July 2013 Dangerous paedophile locked up for seven years – Police found 3.5 MILLION child abuse images A dangerous paedophile has been jailed for seven years after police found more then 3.5 million indecent images on his computer. Thomas Owen, 33, also paid for a seven-year-old Filipino boy to be abused to order. Detectives chanced upon a web chat Owen, known as Porkchop91 online, had with another paedophile who they arrested as part of an investigation into the file sharing site Gigatribe. When he was arrested they found his computer and hard drives were protected by an encryption code which prevented them seeing what he stored. Chris Hopkins, prosecuting, said Owen, of Wilton Street, Wallasey, admitted being attracted to children wearing nappies and swimwear but would collect anything he could swap with other perverts. He gave them the passwords to his files where they found more then 3.5 million indecent images of children and more than 16,000 movies, so many that most of them could not be categorised for seriousness because it would take too long. Owen, who was jailed for three years in 2003 for “fondling” an eight-year-old boy in South Carolina while he was working for Camp America as a volunteer, pleaded guilty to 27 counts of inciting a child to commit indecent acts, making, distributing and possessing indecent images of children. Zilla Williams, defending, told the court Owen was “shocked and surprised by the numbers being talked about but he doesn’t seek to challenge them at all”. She added: “This is a case where the defendant has paid directly three specific sums of money to a particular family or individual where one child has been involved. Whilst he may have mentioned it to another on a chat line he has not sold those images. Those were images he paid for for himself.” Judge Brian Lewis branded Owen a “dangerous offender”.  He added: “This court in the course of its duties sadly has to deal with many cases like this involving the exploitation of children for sexual purposes but rarely I can say has one come across a case with such exceptional levels of criminality.” He jailed him for seven years with an extended license period of three years and told him to sign on the sex offenders register for life.